ABSTRACT

I will seek to consider the simultaneous workings of race and capital in apartheid biopower. J.M. Coetzee offers a reading of apartheid racism as racial madness which is imbricated with economic reason. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed instances of the biopolitical making live and letting die. The Strandfontein homeless camp set up just outside Cape Town in 2020 is an instantiation of a particular normative order, wherein contagion was used to justify the movement of black, homeless people outside of the city’s cordon sanitaire. This is resonant of apartheid racial segregation in which the fear of race mixing is sometimes described in terms of contagion where whiteness represents that which is pure while blackness that which is dirty and infectious. Despite this desire for racial separation, apartheid biopower depends on exploitable black labour to sustain white domination. The figurative work of racial contagion is then undercut when the black worker is to be present and available in white areas to work. Neoliberal modes of power inherit the dual work of race and contagion in apartheid when the poor and black are let to die.

摘要

我将寻求考虑种族隔离生物权力中种族和资本的同时运作。JM Coetzee 将种族隔离种族主义解读为与经济原因交织在一起的种族疯狂。在 COVID-19 大流行之后，我们目睹了生命政治创造生命和让死亡死亡的例子。2020 年在开普敦郊外设立的 Strandfontein 无家可归者营地是特定规范秩序的一个实例，其中传染被用来证明黑人、无家可归者在城市卫生警戒线之外的移动是正当的. 这是种族隔离种族隔离的共鸣，其中有时用传染来描述对种族混合的恐惧，其中白色代表纯洁，而黑色代表肮脏和传染性。尽管有这种种族分离的愿望，种族隔离的生命权力依赖于可剥削的黑人劳动力来维持白人的统治。当黑人工人出现并可以在白人地区工作时，种族传染的象征性工作就会被削弱。当让穷人和黑人死去时，新自由主义的权力模式继承了种族隔离和传染病的双重作用。